Film Review: ‘How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World’: Needed More Zooming and Booming

“How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.” Let’s get right down to what you’re wanting to know: 1) Is it good for kids, 2) is it good for adults, and 3) is it as good as its predecessors?

It’s definitely good for kids, and seated behind me at the critic press screening was a nice, adult lady critic who told me, over and over, and over, and over, and over again, how much she loved this series of taming-the-dragon movies. And so there you have it—yes, and yes. And for No. 3—not really.

Now, the first one, which came out in 2010, was a story about a boy (Hiccup, voiced by Jay Baruchel) and his supercool pet; the coolness stemming from—nevermind the fact that any pet dragon is cool—this boy’s dragon was a Night Fury, not your run-of-the-mill fire-breather. Noooo. This special hot rod of a dragon spewed actual lightning! Those of us who enjoyed high school biology thrilled to the Night Fury’s design being more along the lines of an electric eel than, say, Smaug (the dragon in “The Hobbit”).

The sequel (2014) dealt with now-Hiccup’s-a-teenager issues. And this third installment grows Hiccup all the way up, to where he eventually grows a beard and looks remarkably like actor John Krasinski. And finally takes his place in the leadership lineage of this forefathers.

He furthermore defends his kingdom, establishes a new understanding of the proper relationship between dragons and humans, and ultimately releases the Kraken, er, Toothless his black Night Fury along with Toothless’s new girlfriend, the “Light Fury” (who looks like a cute, coy, white, winged newt), back into their natural habit. Hence “The Hidden World.”

Sounds good, right? But now that everyone’s all grown up, the original kid fun goes away a little bit. Now, we’ve arrived at the stage of “When I became a man, I put away childish things.” Like dragons. And so, therefore, this installment is not quite as awesome for kids as its two predecessors. Still quite good, though!

What Goes On

So, Hiccup is now king of Berk, an island village where humans live in harmony with their dragon pets. It sort of looks like parts of Brazil, very crowded, with everything and everyone stacked on top of each other. In fact, it has a slightly, amusingly, uncomfortably crowded, ghetto-ish look about it. I couldn’t help but think of the inevitable hygiene issues. Hercules and the stable of King Augeas came to mind.

Hiccup’s life’s mission is still as the leader of a dragon-rescue squad, liberating dragons everywhere from captivity. Which is why Berk is now overcrowded. The ineptness of Hiccup’s dragon-saving crew is more than compensated for by his hot-rod dragon’s outsized capacity for mayhem and routing enemies, to the point where it’s called into question whether Hiccup would actually be anything without his dragon.

Anyway, cue new bad guy: dragon-hunter Grimmel the Grisly (voiced by F. Murray Abraham in fine, disdainful form). His dragon philosophy is diametrically opposed to Hiccup’s—enslave ’em or kill ’em all! It’s slightly understandable, given his hench-dragons are sort of nasty, scorpion-like belchers of what appears to be green, hydrochloric acid. Yuck.

Grimmel’s coming for Toothless! It’s on! What to do?! Release all the Krakens! Dragons, I mean! Take them all back to their true home, far across the sea, and down in the depths of the oceans, via a secret portal!

Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) leading his dragon kingdom to freedom in “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.” (Dreamworks Animation/Paramount Pictures)

This is the best part of the movie, the hidden world, bringing to mind James Cameron’s “Avatar” world, looking sort of like a colossal subterranean aviary, the size of which dwarfs immense dragons to the point that they look like flocks of wheeling birds. There should have been more of this world.

While Grimmel hunts for Toothless, Toothless has a beach courtship of his new(t) bride-to-be, which takes the form of many of the bird courtship dances you’ve seen on YouTube and Facebook. Quite cute.

The Night and Light Furies as king and queen of the Hidden World, in “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.” (Dreamworks Animation/Paramount Pictures)

And you’ll immediately start to conjecture about the look of the offspring of black Toothless and white Newt (that’s what I’m naming her). The nice critic lady behind me hoped loudly that one would be a tiny, white Light Fury, with a black ring around one eye, like Pete the Pup from the “The Little Rascals.”

All in all, it needed more of what makes these movies excellent; it needed more of what Navy and Air Force fighter pilots refer to as “zooming and booming” (flying around at supersonic speeds): It needed more GoPro-type footage from the dragon’s-back cockpit. Because we all want to fly, and flying dragons would be so lovely. Similar to the “SNL” skit “More Cowbell,” here, it would be more zooming and booming.

There won’t be another “Tame Your Dragon” movie, but if the new, James Cameron-produced “Alita: Battle Angel” is any indication, we can look forward to some excellent zooming and booming in his next “Avatar.”

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